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Grubb & Ellis Co. spent much of 2009 fixing its balance sheet and reorganizing the executive management team at its Santa Ana headquarters.
Now the real estate brokerage and investor is revamping management of its brokerage operations in Newport Beach and Anaheim, which are among the company’s best-producing offices in the country.
Grubb promoted Jim McFadden and Greg May to serve as co-managing directors of the company’s Orange County brokerage offices, effective immediately.
McFadden primarily will be based in Anaheim and will oversee Grubb’s local industrial brokerage operations. He’s a 24-year veteran at Grubb and previously was senior vice president for Anaheim’s office industrial group.
May will be overseeing the office brokerage operations for Grubb in OC and will be primarily based in Newport Beach. He joined Grubb in 2006, following stints at the local offices of Los Angeles’ Maguire Properties Inc. and Houston’s Transwestern Commercial Services. He’s been one of the top office brokers for Grubb, most recently serving as senior vice president.
Both are taking the management reins during a challenging time for brokerages, although there are signs of improvement. Grubb’s office operations have been much busier so far this year after a tough 2009, according to May.
“There are a lot of deals in process right now,” he said.
McFadden and May are letting go of their brokerage duties with the promotions.
“It’s hard to be a player-coach,” May said.
Expect a lot of interaction between the two managing directors.
“We want to make sure we’ve got all our OC operations on the same page,” McFadden said.
Grubb counts about 75 brokers in OC. Retaining brokers while attracting new ones amid a tough commercial real estate market is among their top duties.
“If you can succeed in this environment, you can only go upward,” McFadden said.
“The culture here is very entrepreneurial, but there’s still a national scope” to the company, May said.
The two are taking over managing director duties from Greg Coxon, president of Grubb’s transaction service for the western U.S.
Coxon had been acting as interim managing director for the OC offices since last summer, when former head of OC operations Kurt Strassman left Grubb to join Newport Beach-based Voit Real Estate Services.
McFadden and May report to Chuck Hunt, who in January was named to oversee Grubb’s Southern California brokerage operations. He’s based out of the company’s Los Angeles office.
Storage Growth
Ladera Ranch-based Strategic Storage Trust Inc., a real estate investment trust that focuses on self-storage spaces, has been busy making deals of late, about two years after it kicked off operations.
The company recently bought two facilities, in Fort Lee, N.J. and Weston, Fla., for a combined $23 million.
The New Jersey property, bought for $16.8 million, is a 965-unit self storage facility near Manhattan that totals about 98,000 square feet and is about 88% full.
The Florida property is a 650-unit facility 14 miles west of Fort Lauderdale that totals about 52,000 square feet and is 86% full.
The seller of both properties was an offshoot of New York’s Babcock & Brown Ltd.
Strategic Storage began raising money for its non-traded real investment trust in 2008. To date it’s raised about $118 million. It plans to continue raising money until early 2011. It now owns 28 properties in 14 states.
Big-Screen Lease
Newport Beach-based real estate investor Hager Pacific Properties said it inked one of the largest industrial leases in Dearborn, Mich., of late, by making a deal with a growing electronics retailer based in Orange County.
Hager leased an 112,500-square-foot warehouse, office and distribution center to Paul’s TV, a seller of big-screen TVs and other electronics that’s expanding nationally. In addition to Southern California, Paul’s TV, whose corparate operations are run out of Irvine, has stores in the Boston area.
The five-year lease is valued at about $3 million, which equates to monthly rents of about 45 cents per square foot. It’s Dearborn’s largest 2010 lease so far, according to the landlord.
Hager Pacific bought the property and other Dearborn buildings totaling about 190,000 square feet in 2006 for about $10 million.
